For example, let's say you want to play the song "The Irish Rover" on guitar. The song uses a lot of open chords and has a distinctive rhythm that can be difficult to replicate in different keys. But by using a capo, you can easily change the key of the song to fit your voice or the sound you're trying to achieve.
To walk into his store is a sight to behold. The walls are lined with instruments from various eras, from legacy brands like Fender and Gibson to instruments from uncommon makers such as Paoletti and Mervin Davis. The staff are also not shy about letting anyone try anything. Want to play the $20,000 1950s Stratocaster? Go ahead!
Louis Armstrongonce famously said, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” Some will say that talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Jazz has undergone several phases over the years, from big band to bebop to fusion to fuzak (though the less said about that one, the better). Many common elements exist in these styles that help define them as jazz.
One of the most popular, if not the most popular, songs of the holiday season, Silent Night,originated in 1818 in the Austrian village of Oberndorf. Joseph Mohr, the local parish priest, approached Franz Xaver Gruber, a school teacher and organist, with a poem he had written. On Christmas Eve, faced with a malfunctioning organ, Gruber composed a simple melody to accompany Mohr's verses (with a guitar, no less! How fitting for this blog!). The song was first performed on Christmas Eve in 1818 at the St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf
A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for this blog called “Down That Stream Without A Paddle.” It was a bit of a grim tale about how streaming is making it harder for musicians and songwriters to earn any decent amount of money from their work. Compared to radio and physical sales, the amounts the streamers (even the well-paying ones) are dishing out per spin almost seemed like a joke.
Rather than the traditional bar used by lap and pedal steel players, he has three differing ball-ended slides on his fingers, one on his ring finger and two smaller ones on his index finger and thumb. He began working on a technique around 2014 when he was gifted a lap steel guitar.
Austin’s Hippie scene was likely what Nelson needed to get his creativity going again. He went back to performing and writing, combining his songwriting style with elements of country, folk, jazz, and rock and roll into a new sound (creating the blueprint for what would be known as Outlaw Country).
For one thing, it helps keep our ears and minds fresh. After listening to tons of guitar-based music, you do hit a saturation point where you do want to listen to something else. It can be possible to have too much of a good thing. Sometimes, a trip into another genre is all you need to clear your mind.
Many, many years ago, while perusing the pages of a guitar magazine, there was an article with various pro players offering various tips to improve one’s playing. One that stood out for me was a tip from the great Steve Morse (of the Dixie Dregs and Deep Purple), who had a tip about soloing over changes.
People in the music industry give me blank stares when I brush off 8 million dollar offers. I don't want 6 tour buses, 15 tractor trailers and a jet. I don't want to play stadium shows, I don't want to be in the spotlight. I wrote the music I wrote because I was suffering with mental health and depression. These songs have connected with millions of people on such a deep level because they're being sung by someone feeling the words in the very moment they were being sung.
Some may think though that this truly isn’t a custom instrument, to which I say poppycock! Some of the most iconic instruments, from Billy Sheehan’s original P-Bass, to Brent Mason’s famous three-pickup Telecaster, were all the result of a player taking an instrument and improving it to suit their needs.
We love our streaming services (the Apple Musics and Spotifys of the world). They’re cheap and convenient ways to access vast libraries of music. For the artists though, cheap and convenient comes at a cost.
As promised at the end of that post, we would dive next into the world of Open D tuning, another favourite among many guitar players. Open D (and its variants of Open C and Open E) have been used by the likes of Derek Trucks, Joey Landreth, Stone Gossard, Neil Young and a plethora of other players.
One of the last times I did a hired-gun gig for a house band, I got a call at around 7:30 a.m. on a Friday in February 2023. It was Shawn Sasyniuk (drummer/multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire and all-around great dude), asking if I was busy the following weekend and if I happened to be available for a couple of days. The guitarist that he originally wanted for a house band at a gig backing up several artists was no longer available to do it and he needed someone to fill the spot.
You can however argue that Tyler Childers is way more “country” than the majority of Country artists on Top 40 radio. Songs from his album Purgatorysound like they belong in the same set as Hank Williams and George Strait, rather than Florida Georgia Line and Jellyroll. To my ears, what Childers is doing is Country Music in its most traditional and identifiable forms.
His sound is not far from the truth. As stated earlier, he would fit in with a lot of older artists and is musically a standout in today’s modern country scene. As he stated in an interview with theGuardian in 2019: “Let’s not just Solo cup and pickup truck it to death. Let’s handle this in a smart way. Nobody is thinking about lyrical content, or how we’re moving people, or what’s going on in the background of their minds.”
In my formative years, my guitar teacher Jean-Marc Guenette gave me a set of strumming exercises to work on. These exercises had me counting a series of 16th notes, strumming on some, not on others, all while keeping a constant down-up motion with my right hand.
In 2019, Bryan amassed a collection of songs written in just a couple of months. He and his friends rented an Airbnb in Florida, threw some mattresses on the walls to create a makeshift studio and recorded what was to be his debut albumDeAnn(named after his late mother). It was also around this time that the YouTube video for the song “Heading South” was uploaded to YouTube.
Nashville session guitarist Ray Edenton is often credited with developing this tuning, looking for a way to get more jangle out of the acoustic guitar while reducing the inherent boomy-ness of the instrument. What he got were the jangly characteristics that are common on a 12-string guitar without the lower octaves adding any low end to the sound.
When I started teaching guitar, I began by using whatever method books the schools and music stores used but found that the exercises were just that, exercises. Good lessons, but nothing that the student wanted to play. Anyone who tries their hand at guitar wants to play songs and riffs and doesn’t care for scales and theory (at least not at first).
Probably one of the most famous songs to make use of a capo, Don Felder originally wrote the song in E minor. While the original version had some weight because of where the chords sat in the guitar’s range, it was out of range for Don Henley’s voice. So, out comes the capo and seven (!) frets later, “Hotel California” took its final shape in the key of B minor.
The majority of our wooden picks have been made of rosewood, though we have also offered picks in other woods such as bubinga, tigerwood and purpleheart. On the Janka Hardness Scale, rosewood is the softest of these offerings, coming in at a rating of 1,960 lbf (pounds-force). This rating allows us to make picks that still have a flex and thickness that compare to a Fender Medium on the thinner side, and a Fender Heavy on the thicker side.
The United States national anthem is a mash-up of two different sources. The lyrics themselves came from the poemDefense of Fort M’Henry, written and published in 1814 by Francis Scott Key. The poem itself contains four stanzas, the first one being the commonly-sung lyrics toThe Star-Spangled Banner. Key’s words reflected what he saw during the bombardment of Fort McHenry, including a large flag flying above the Fort following the U.S. victory. That flag, as well as much of the action he saw, inspired the imagery found in the lyrics.
Born in Greenwich Village in 1968, Hunter grew up in Berkley, California with his mother. It was through her that he got his first taste of music, starting with her collection of old blues records, as well as her work as a repairwoman at Subway Guitar. He started playing guitar at age 13, and at 14 he was taking lessons with Joe Satriani (who was teaching at Subway Guitar at the time). Through all of this, he was listening to a very eclectic mix of music, from the Dead Kennedys to John Coltrane, to Lightning Hopkins.
